Music and people hold my life together. I describe experiences, discoveries and insights, often connected with music and with teaching and playing piano. The blog is a way to stay in touch with friends, and may also be food for thought for anyone else, especially people connected with music and the piano/
Musik und Menschen halten mein Leben zusammen. Ich beschreibe Erfahrungen, Entdeckungen und Einsichten, oft in Zusammenhang mit dem Klavierspiel und dem Klavierunterricht.

Sunday, July 22, 2018

The 10-day Young Artists’ World Piano
Festival is an excellent opportunity for pre-college pianists to
immerse themselves in playing piano, to broaden their musical experience and share
it with like-minded companions. Students may be as young as eight and come with
their parents, or they may be in high school, aspiring to be professional
musicians and prepare to audition at a major music school. All students are
supported at their respective levels, resulting in a joyful, vibrant community.
The program offers private lessons with a distinguished faculty, and musicianship-
and studio classes for everybody. Participating in master classes, a
solo-performance – and a concerto competition are opportunities for advanced
students who want to challenge themselves.

Seymour Bernstein was one of the guest artists this year.
Observing my teacher teach was a most inspiring experience.

Time disappears, as he works with a young student whose
piece ends with a single, very soft note. It takes a certain motion to create
that sound, and it’s not easy. The key has to be lowered very slowly. But if
it’s too slow, the hammer won’t hit the string and the note won’t speak. If
it’s too fast, it comes out too loud, and the piece ends with an ugly clunk.

Seymour’s voice is soft, but intense. His clear instructions
and infinite patience create a safe, intimate space on the concert stage of the
vast auditorium at Bethel University. The
task absorbs both teacher and student. “Did you like that sound” he asks the
student. She shakes her head. “Well, then try it again.”

Private lessons in the auditorium

It’s fashionable to talk about “flow” these days. Seymour
doesn’t talk about it. He takes the student through the experience. Yes, one
note can be important enough to spend a considerable part of the lesson on it.
It takes as long as it takes. There are no shortcuts.

Mechanics alone won’t achieve the goal. “Your technique
allows you to play anything you want,” he comments after a young virtuoso’s
stunning performance of Chopin’s Scherzo in c-sharp minor.“But your interpretation is shallow; it
doesn’t mean anything.” That’s a harsh verdict. It could hurt a student, unless
the teacher shows him how to do otherwise. Together, they set out to mine the
score for meaning.

“Chopin’s Scherzos are emotional dramas,” Seymour explains.
“The beginning is spooky. If you don’t play it right, you won’t get a feeling
for the piece. Feel the f going to f-sharp. How will you shape it? Which one of
the three motives is the spookiest? The chords are a call to arms, they have to
sound angry.”

How do you make a chord sound angry? Prepare it with a swing
stroke and lower the arm into the key, rather than bounce off of it. A phase of
experimentation follows.Once the
student has figured out how to do it, decisions have to be made. How do the
chords relate to each other? Which one marks the peak of the phrase; it has to
be the strongest.

Demonstrating a motion

At first, it’s about the direction and the speed of the
motion, the arm, the wrist and the fingers that transfer the energy into the
key. In the process of trying, those elements merge with the sound they create
and become an imprint in your mind. Making
a physical connection to musical feeling,Seymour calls it. You have to
observe what you’re doing and listen into yourself. The sound that expresses
how you feel the music resides inside. It can’t be imposed.

The change that’s achieved is almost magical. “This student
is seething with emotion,” Seymour comments later. Sometimes, it’s easier to
hide behind your skill than share what you really feel. It takes courage, and
before that, encouragement.

The master class as a group experience. All students play their pieces first, as in a concert,
so that performance anxiety doesn't get in the way of attention while Seymour works with them afterwards.

The score is projected on a screen. That way, everybody can follow explanations

“Why do you play the piano?” No master class ends without a
discussion of that question. Playing concerts, winning competitions, even
launching a successful performing career doesn’t guarantee happiness or even
satisfaction. The lasting benefit of playing a musical instrument is the integration
of emotion, reason and physicality. You train this every time you practice.
Applied to life, it becomes the key to fulfillment.

Discussion at the end of the master class

After the discussion, there’s often the encore, the surprise,
when Seymour shares something special from his life, an experience, a photo, a
piece of music that has moved him deeply.

Leopold Mozart about his little son's first composition

“I hope I won’t break out into tears when I share this with you,” he says, before he reads Leopold Mozart’s comments about little Wolfgang’s first composition: “Wolfgang composed and learnt this little Minuet within half an hour the day before his 5th birthday." That a child this young could compose a melody that is so beautiful…”

W.A. Mozart, Minuet and Trio in G-major K1

Seymour goes to the concert grand that stands in the
spotlight center stage. After a master class program that featured brilliant
performances of Chopin’s Scherzo No 3,
the first movement of Beethoven’s Waldstein
Sonata, and Liszt’s Harmonies du Soir,
he plays W.A. Mozart’s Minuet and Trio in G-major K1. Every single note is
shaped with the love and care deserving of a masterpiece - a demonstration of
humility by a master, who has preserved his awe and reverence of beauty
throughout all the years he’s been living with it.

Wednesday, July 4, 2018

The rubble has disappeared under a smooth surface. The
building above the new World Trade Center subway station spreads its wings like
a bird that is ready to take off into the air. It shelters not only commuters
on the way to their destination, but a shopping mall – what else! The area is
bustling with people.

Inside of the building

Subway Entrance

The Shops

To the right, the glass-covered façade of the 9/11 museum
reflects the buildings that surround it. I visited the museum once, and I
didn’t like it.

Replays of the twin towers collapsing in a cloud of smoke on
the screen appeared like a scene from a movie, already seen too often. They
failed to convey the feelings of a moment when everybody who lived through it
remembers where they were and what they were doing.

Relics of the destruction in a clinically clean environment
seemed strangely out of place. In Cologne, Germany, where I grew up, the
streetcar still passed lots with bombed out houses twenty years after the end
of WW II. The remains of places where people once lived were a constant
reminder that nothing was safe while the Cold War was hanging over us. Its end
was a miracle, and we sort of forgot about war in the West…

Close to the entrance of the museum, there’s an unfamiliar
sight today: a grand piano, roped off from the steady stream of
passers-by.The sun reflects from the
high gloss finish of the lid that is still closed. Is this Piano A, or Piano B,
I wonder, while studying the map I received this morning together with final
instructions and the penultimate version of the program for “WTC@WTC - the Well-Tempered Clavier at the World Trade Center.”

WTC@WTC Logo

28 pianists have responded to the invitation to play
Preludes and Fugues from J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier on the 9/11 memorial
square between 5 and 7 pm on the afternoon of June 21st, the day of
the summer solstice, and “Make
Music New York.” The annual
festival “by the people and for the people celebrates the
musician in all of us, connects New Yorkers to their communities
and to each other,” describes the announcement. Parks,
squares and public spaces turn into concert stages for amateurs and
professionals of all musical styles, skills and backgrounds. WTC@WTC took place
last year, too, but I was in Germany at the time. When I found out that it
would happen again this year, I couldn’t wait to sign up.

My connection to
WTC@WTC is personal. The application for my work visa in the US was submitted
on the day before the attack on the Twin Towers, and nobody knew what would become of the plans to relocate from Germany to the US. When everything worked out, Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier became my companion while I began to make my home in the new country.

The notice that my Green Card - the application for
permanent residence - had been approved arrived on the day I played my first
try-out for a complete performance of WTC 1. WTC 2 kept me grounded after I
made use of the newly acquired freedom and started to work as a private
teacher and free-lance musician. Now, I play four Preludes and Fugues every
morning when I start to practice, and I can only confirm pianist Andras
Schiff’s opinion: If you start your day with Bach, what can go wrong?

Now I have to find the right piano. A security guard informs me that Piano B, where I’m scheduled to open the program at 5 pm, is on the
back side of the museum. I get on the way, eager to stay under the trees in
search of shade – they have grown since my last visit two years ago.

The Map

It’s warm, but pleasant; the atmosphere in the park is peaceful.Visitors are milling about the grounds in a
manner that makes me think of the prelude that opens book 1 of the WTC: “mellow
happiness.”

And yet, the past is present. I overhear a conversation, a
couple discussing the spelling of a name they’ve been trying to find among the
inscriptions on the walls that surround two big, square black holes that gape
in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood.

Water constantly runs down the walls, but only a thin layer
covers the bottom of the crater before it disappears in the abyss in the
middle. You can almost feel the surge. It’s the void that will always remain.

I couldn’t imagine anything better than Bach's music, to spread good vibes at a
place that has seen as much destruction and pain as the former site of the
World Trade Center. It doesn’t even matter if people will stop and listen –
it’s a symbol, like touching the letters of the victims’ names, or like the
rose, that is placed there on their birthday.

Piano B is comfortably in the shade. A friendly event
steward with a clipboard welcomes pianists and checks off names. He invites me
to try the piano. Pianos are like life itself, you’ve got to make the most of
whatever you get. I run a few scales and arpeggios across the keys that are
warm from the sun, and the beginning of my first piece. On this day, in this
place, life is excellent! The sound is mellow and pleasant, the touch is
responsive, and it’s perfectly tuned. I was expecting a “street piano” - this
piano could grace any concert stage.

Street Piano, Play-me-I'm-Yours 2012

Piano B, ready to start and in great shape,
thanks to PianoPiano, who made the instruments available

I’ve chosen six Preludes and Fugues from Book 2 that I’ve
presented in lectures recently. (Click on the links for my recording of each piece on youtube.) The music traces everything this place has seen
from the grief that followed the disaster to the serenity that prevails here
today.

The Prelude and Fugue in F-sharp minor is my favorite “From
Grief to Joy” piece. The Prelude
is one of the most beautiful laments Bach ever wrote. Each of the Fugue’s three subjects
is more energetic than the one before, and the piece ends in a life-affirming
combination of all three musical ideas.

The B-flat
minor Prelude joins the insight that pain is inevitable with the
determination to keep going. The B-flat minor Fugue is a
study in conflict resolution. The subject is edgy to begin with, an open-ended
like a question. In search of an answer, Bach turns it on its head. The subject
and its inversion face each other like representatives of two opposing,
incompatible points of view.

Accompanied – or should one say disturbed – by a chromatic
countersubject, that brings in a lot of notes that don’t belong to the key –
it’s the combination of the subject with its inversion that leads to a
triumphant major chord at the end.

From the corner of my eye, I see people passing. Some stop
to take a picture, and then, stay a moment longer. Applause between pieces
suggests that there must be an audience in the background. And what a treat for
pianists, normally confined to the indoors by the nature of their instrument,
to play outside and contribute to the sounds of the city.

I’ve enjoyed every moment of the performance, but I’m glad I
got to play at the beginning, so I can enjoy the rest of the program as an
audience member.

Note the photographer behind the piano...

A relaxed chat after playing

and trying to stay focussed before the performance -
my colleagues Rita Anthoine and François Nezwazky from the Leschetizky Association

Time passes quickly, while young and old, professional and
amateurs unleash Bach’s music into the atmosphere with spirit and excellence. We
should do this every year in this place. And maybe, we’ll get inspired to model
our interactions with each other on Bach’s mastery of weaving together
independent, but not self-sufficient voices, each one prepared to lead, follow,
and share the load…